The genesis of MGM's Freaks was a magazine piece by Ted Robbins titled Spurs. The story involved a terrible revenge enacted by a mean-spirited circus midget upon his normal-sized wife. In adapting Spurs for the screen, writers Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Wolf, and Al Boasberg retained the circus setting and the little man-big woman ...
In Dead Reckoning, Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart) recites the film's plotline to a priest in the confessional. Murdock and Johnny Drake (William Prince) are Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, en route to Washington by train. Drake hops off and disappears, leading Murdock on a hectic manhunt. Upon meeting Drake's former girlfriend Coral ...
Bucolic lawyer John Wayne takes on big-city corruption in A Man Betrayed. He sets out to prove that an above-suspicion politician (Edward Ellis) is actually a crook. The price of integrity is sweet in this instance, since Wayne happens to be in love with the politician's daughter (Frances Dee). Man Betrayed can be viewed from the vantage point of ...
As shown by the clock face that opens and closes the film, The Set-Up takes place within a compact 72 minutes, with the action played out in "real time." Robert Ryan plays Bill "Stoker" Thompson, a washed-up boxer who refuses to give up his career despite the pleas of his wife Julie (Audrey Totter). There's little chance that he's going to win ...
Up until its surisingly mundane finale, A Lawless Street is one of the best of the Randolph Scott westerns of the 1950s. Scott plays famed marshal Calem Ware, whose strenous activities on behalf of law and order have exacted a toll on his personal life. Keeping the peace in the town of Medicine Bend, Ware hopes to someday be reconciled with his ex ...
Egyptian mystic Andoheb (George Zucco) is ordered by his High Priest (Eduardo Ciannelli) to stand guard over the sacred mummy of Kharis (Tom Tyler), who thousands of years earlier was entombed alive for falling in love with Egyptian Princess Ananka. Kharis can be revived or neutralized at will through the simple expedient of burning a handful of ...
Anthony Mann directed this brilliant psychological Western reminiscent of Shakespeare's King Lear. James Stewart plays Will Lockhart, who is obsessed with finding the man who sold automatic rifles to the Apaches, resulting in the death of his brother. Will enters the town of Coronado, NM, ruled by the blind and aging patriarch Alec Waggoman ...
Whatever poor Bela Lugosi may have done in a past life, the man did not deserve The Ape Man, arguably the worst of his Monogram horror clunkers. Viewed today, it seems that screenwriter Barney Sarecky and infamous director William Beaudine (whose nickname "One Shot" was earned helming movies like this) were out to humiliate the proud Hungarian ...
The Informer, Liam O'Flaherty's novel of the the Irish "troubles" of the early 1920s, was first filmed in England in 1929, with Cyril McLaglen in the lead. When director John Ford remade The Informer in 1935, the role of the tragic Irish roisterer Gypo Nolan went to Cyril's brother Victor McLaglen. The scene is Dublin, during the Sinn Fein ...
To the world at large, Mr. Wong (Bela Lugosi) is a harmless shopkeeper in the Chinatown district (where no one seems unduly put off by his Hungarian accent) In truth, however, Wong is an eeeeevil Mandarin who'll stop at nothing to get his hands on the Twelve Coins of Confucious, which according to legend will allow him to rule over the Chinese ...
The moodily evocative docudrama T-Men stars Dennis O'Keefe as Dennis O'Brien, a treasury agent determined to bring a counterfeiting ring to justice. O'Brien and his partner Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder) go undercover to gain the confidence of the ruthless Detroit mob responsible for the phony money. The plot, compelling though it is, takes second ...
With an ingenious script by Roy Chanslor, this modest, but imaginative film noir is notable for the strong performance by lead actor Dan Duryea Alcoholic musician Martin Blair (Duryea) becomes the prime suspect when his cheating wife is murdered, until it is determined that he was "sleeping one off" at the time of the killing. Another man (John ...
In his first film in two years, James Cagney stars as Nick Condon, the American editor of a pre-WW2 Tokyo newspaper. When two of his best friends are horribly murdered, Condon suspects that the "peaceful" Japanese military government is up to no good. He dedicates himself to getting his hands on the "Tanka Plan," a Japanese blueprint for ...
With Robert Riskin as screenwriter, director William Wellman proved in Magic Town that it was possible to make a Frank Capra-esque picture without Capra himself at the helm. James Stewart plays Rip Smith, a cynical pollster who comes across a small American town named Grandview, which represents a "perfect" balance of ethnic types, professions, ...
Joan Crawford is her usual upwardly mobile self in this melodrama co-starring Clark Gable. She plays Marian Martin, a cynical small-town girl determining to give up the idea of marriage. Kept by wealthy attorney Mark Whitney (Gable), Marian assumes a new identity as a divorced woman of the world, but her newfound life of luxury comes crashing down ...
Based on a Zane Grey novel published over a decade after the author's death, The Maverick Queen stars Barbara Stanwyck in the title role. As head of the outlaw gang called The Wild Bunch, Kit Banion (Stanwyck) wreaks havoc on the banks and railroads of the West. Pinkerton detective Jeff (Barry Sullivan) infiltrates the gang, falling in love with ...
Stars-on-the-downslide Wallace Ford and Marian Marsh briefly rallied in the above-average Monogram melodrama Murder by Invitation. Ford is cast as usual as a wisecracking reporter, this time christened Bob White. Our hero is one of several acquaintances and relatives invited to an old dark house to attend the reading of a will. At the stroke of ...
Warren William plays a high-powered ambitious executive who unflinchingly steamrolled his way to the top without regard for the havoc he left in his wake. As the manager of a Macy-like department store, he constantly browbeats his flunkies into submission, and ends-up driving at least one to suicide. Loretta Young plays the wife of one of William ...
Men may come and men may go, but silly service comedies like Swing It Sailor go on forever. James Dunn and Ray Mayer star as Pete Kelly and Husky Stone a pair of over-age but under-mature gobs. Pete and Husky's main purpose in life seems to be duking it out over the affections of peroxide blonde Myrtle Montrose (Isabel Jewell) Back on duty, our ...
PRC's Machine Gun Mama is the sort of comedy that tries to get laughs by invoking the name of Brooklyn. Wallace Ford and El Brendel play a couple of American dimwits who find themselves travelling through Latin America with an elephant. Why an elephant? So Wally and El can sell the pachyderm to a broken-down carnival, thereby making the ...
Hoping to avoid the new inheritance tax, eccentric millionaire Jasper Whyte (Charles Grapewin) gathers together his greedy relatives and associates and announces that he intends to give away his fortune to his long-lost granddaughter Doris -- but if she doesn't show up for the reading of the will, the money will be divided evenly among the heirs. ...
Ace police reporter Wally Williams (Wallace Ford) is so devoted to his job that he even neglects his new bride Alice (Jean Parker) on their honeymoon. Right now, Wally is covering a suicide which he suspects is actually a murder-a suspicion apparently corroborated by a cryptic note and a second mysterious death. Deciding that if you can't beat 'em ...
William K. Howard, a once-prestigious director fallen on hard times in 1939, proved that he still had the "right stuff" with the modest tearjerker Back Door to Heaven. Wallace Ford stars as Frankie, a pugnacious drifter stigmatized by his reform-school upbringing. Frankie and his former "classmate" Jud (Stu Erwin) try to go straight, but get mixed ...
Exiled to Shanghai uses the then-waging wars in Spain and China as backdrops for a familiar "rival reporters" yarn. Wallace Ford plays Ted Young, a brash newsreel cameraman who is fired by his dyspeptic editor Fred Sears (Dean Jagger) for photographing the wrong general during the Spanish Civil War. Down but not out, Ted embraces a new form of ...
Money Means Nothing to tire salesman Kenneth (Wallace Ford), mainly because he doesn't have any. But when Kenneth falls in love with wealthy Julie (Gloria Shea), he feels obliged to support her in the manner to which she is accustomed. Thus, when a shipment of tires is hijacked, Kenneth is immediately fingered as the thief. He isn't, of course, ...
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